Lunch and Learn: Professor Paul Kosmin on Apocalypticism

Belshazzar's Feast from the Book of Daniel (oil on canvas, John Martin, 1820)

Please join us for a lunch and learn with professor Paul Kosmin, who will talk about some of his current research on new developments in ideas of history and time in the Hellenistic age, with a particular focus on the emergence of apocalyptic theology in the book of Daniel and 1 Enoch.

Paul J. Kosmin was born and raised in London. Having read Ancient and Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford (BA 2005), he moved to Harvard University for his Ph.D. His first book, “The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire” (Harvard University Press, 2015), examines the relationship between the kings of the Seleucid dynasty and the landscape, from Bactria to Thrace, over which they ruled. More generally, Paul is interested in Hellenistic kingship and imperialism, ancient ethnography, interactions between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds, and Greek epigraphy. Current projects include a study of the role of magical rituals in city-state politics and an investigation of newly emerging temporalities in the Hellenistic world.